Army Wants Malware Guns to Infect Enemy Computers

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Imagine this: In the near future, an undercover Special Forces
soldier needs to infect an enemy computer with surveillance
software.

But instead of accessing the target computer over the Internet,
hijacking a Wi-Fi signal or physically
inserting a USB drive, the soldier takes up a position near
the building housing the computer.

He raises an electronic rifle, aims at the machine through a
glass window and zap! The computer is infected.

Impossible? Not to the U.S. Army's Intelligence and Information
Warfare Directorate, which is looking into ways to bridge the
"air gap" that separates protected, isolated computers from
external networks.

A fascinating story in C4ISR Journal details how private
companies are trying to meet the Army's requests by studying
and exploiting the faint electromagnetic field that all
electronic devices emit.

(C4ISR is a military acronym for "command, control,
communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance.")

A few years ago, Swiss researchers showed it was possible to read
keystrokes by monitoring a computer's emissions, even from
another room. You can view demonstrations on SecurityTube.net.

The Army's researchers are trying to attempt the reverse — to use
electronic emissions to enter code into a computer.

"This is old technology," a retired Army intelligence official
told C4ISR Journal. "The technology itself isn't new, but the
application of the technology is new, and the software running
the technology on some of these devices is new."

Unnamed experts hinted to C4ISR Journal that current limitations
force electromagnetic code injectors to be very close to their
targets, and that
data-transfer rates are slow.

But most of the sources the reporter spoke to were optimistic.

"We have to understand better the electromagnetic spectrum," a
director of the Army's electronic-warfare efforts told the
magazine. "If you control the electromagnetic spectrum, you
control the fight."